But this. This baffles me. Deeply.
Skype worked as a p2p network, where some peers where marked as super peers and would help with peers behind firewalls (UDP-holepunching), and routing through the super peer. If your phone became a super peer, you could expect to essentially work like a server, with the "benefits" of increased bandwidth usage and power usage. Not exactly what you want as a mobile user.
So Microsoft had to change the architecture (which wasn't designed with mobile devices in mind) into a more centralised approach that could work with mobile devices.
As an engineer and software developer, I find this to be extremely unlikely.
If "super-peers" can already route traffic for others, it seems very likely they could simply route all traffic for Mobile users through some "super-duper peer", instead of routing all traffic for all users through some "super-duper peer".
- http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6488287/
- https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/p2p/2008/3318/00/3...
Or to put it another way: If I accept the choice is between routing mobile traffic to Microsoft, or no mobile-Skype support, I don't understand how it follows that all traffic needs to move through Microsoft, or no mobile-Skype support.
I'm sure there were other reasons involved in the decision, I don't pretend to know them, but from a business perspective alone, you choose one connection methodology and you stick with it. Anything more is wasteful of resources.
They already had a protocol that essentially did both.
Once you have forwarding/routing i.e. what Skype called "super-nodes", P2P is a clear superset of "centralised".
Anyone who says different doesn't know what they're talking about.
> I'm sure there were other reasons involved in the decision, I don't pretend to know them, but from a business perspective alone, you choose one connection methodology and you stick with it. Anything more is wasteful of resources.
I'm not speculating.
I've seen engineers do stupid things that don't make sense; I'm not arguing that there are stupid reasons for it, and I'm not going to argue that there's non-technical reasons for it.
But technical reasons? I don't buy it. I need some convincing: If one protocol (the P2P one) does both use cases, then you don't need another protocol just to handle one use case. That's just not how protocols work.
"Hey guys, I've got a patent for talking from one machine to another over a connection." (Don't give SCO any ideas.)
The purpose of patents was to foster innovation, not squander it.
What if Issac Newton and Liebniz had a "foundation" that owned the rights to every mathematical construct they discovered? How would the world function if we had to pay that foundation fees every time we used Newton's method, or Calculus? It'd be complete bureaucratic hell.
And further, coming from another angle, I bet you money there are prior implementations of P2P chat long before... 2005.
I was working on an app that had graph-like data so we decided to use a graph database...nothing super innovative. My coworker, who apparently had a couple patents, said that we could probably patent this algorithm. I looked at him and said, how can you patent traversing nodes and vertices... that's graph theory 101?!
Big companies try to patent everything because its a metric they can use to show how amazing they are, and acts as blackmail (or cold war). If you sue me, I'll sue you.
This might be one reason why. Fuck software patents.
Edit: There's https://tox.chat but I have never used it/always forget it exists. Antidote/Antox fas clients for iOS/Android.
A simplified explanation: Mobile devices will often ignore almost all incoming network traffic to reduce battery usage. The only way to reliably communicate with the device is through a centralized push notification service (e.g. APN and GCM).
You use a central server to do the discovery and bootstrap the connection between two devices. For each device it looks like they are connecting out. This works for UDP and this works for TCP. It works both for NAT'ed and LAN peers. For the latter it works 100% of time. This is a 10 year old tech. It worked back then and it works now.
We ban accounts that are uncivil like this, and you've done it a lot in the past, though happily not in the recent past, so please just don't do it at all.
If I read you correctly, you seem to have significantly lowered the plank for what you ban people for. What the OP said was a complete factual garbage showing an utter lack of understanding of the subject he is so confidently commenting on. So this was, by any conventional definition of the term, a bullshit. How can this conceivably be a cause for a ban?
It's easy to point out that a statement is wrong without being disrespectful, if you want to, and so neither damage the community nor discredit the truth with personal bad behavior. That way we all can learn something.
Perceptions of what's uncivil can vary for legitimate reasons, e.g. differing cultural standards—HN is a highly international community. But for that very reason, we need people to err on the side of being respectful. The alternative leads to wars and ultimately the death of the forum.
> differing cultural standards
Well, that's exactly the problem, isn't it?
What passes for normal "civil" behavior in countries like States and Canada looks like a completely fake way to express sentiments in other parts of the world. If someone asks "how are you?", they, more often than not, actually want to know how you are, not soliciting the "I'm fine" response.
What I said in the comment you killed I would absolutely not hesitate to say in person. I did not want to point out that his statement was wrong. I had an issue with the fact that he was commenting on things he doesn't appear to understand well in the first place. This was a personal remark, but I'm not sure which format you expect it to be distilled in to be acceptable as "civil".
If we are to reverse the situation, i.e. if it was me who blurted out something equally majestic, I would expect and prefer to be told just that instead of a wishy-washy pretense polite way. To me, coming from one of them "different cultural standards", the latter is a strange and alien way to communicate with others... which brings us right back to your remark about being respectful. Sometimes I'd be blunt when responding to comments I find particularly inane, but I also expect others to be blunt to me if the situation warrants it. Being blunt is not the same as being disrespectful, leave alone "uncivil".
> Then we all can learn something, which is the intended use of the site.
I've always viewed HN as a place for discussion with people of similar interests. Some may indeed learn a thing or two here, just like on any other forum, but stating that it's the intended use of the site is really quite strange.
There’s fsync() but it only syncs when you launch the app - what I think you meant is “there’s no continuously syncing iOS SyncThing app”.
I am using CSipSimple to my own server, battery usage is the same. Yes this is anecdotal evidence, but one can always check.
Unfortunate result is hundred of apps waking up the phone ever 20 seconds and transmitting data nonstop. Sigh.
How Skype works, is how msn messenger worked, office messenger, then office communicator worked, then Lync, now skype.
They moved Skype to their existing infrastructure
Other explanations that seem plausible:
* IBM patent, as other poster pointed out.
* ability to monitor/censor users more directly (to stay in government's good graces)
* problems with peers invading privacy or taking other malicious actions
In fairness, it was eBay that first bought Skype [1] in 2005 centralizing the data. eBay then sold it to a private investor group which Microsoft then bought Skype from [2] in 2011.
Following the Snowden leaks as well as the information from Bill Binney, NSA scoops up the data regardless..
That seems like pretty unreasonable tinfoil. There is no reason for Microsoft to want to give information to governments. I assume they don't pay, and the cost is consumer trust. Makes a lot of sense to rearchitect such that you can't give in to government demands.
Apple might actually be making consumers care in an odd way by making it such a public issue.
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/apple-sets-date-for-china-d...
No? I don't think you are being fair.
First of all Microsoft is not one mind. There are lots of motivations bouncing around inside that entity, and not all of those motivations are 'reasonable' like you purport to be.
Second, secret court orders get issued to these big companies all the time. You don't know what kind of affordances Microsoft has provided for US and foreign government and intelligence services.
> I assume they don't pay ...
Oh let's not be pollyannaish, any contract work done for governments would be paid work. Cha-CHING! I see dolla signs. $$$
It's infinitely reasonable to distrust large internet companies that gather interesting user data. paule89 just came right out and says what a lot of us reasonable folk are thinking.
Maybe someone at Microsoft's decided it would be more profitable to salvage the Skype name and introduce some real end-to-end encryption just like the competition has. Or, maybe Microsoft is helping the Five Eyes to use Skype + Signal as a big real-world test bed for cracking or weakening Signal's encryption. I mean, it's just impossible to know what's really going on here.
Doesn't seem so to me.
>I assume they don't pay
You're dead wrong, my friend. They do pay. A lot. Think of all those juicy government contracts.
Though, some companies are handed a court order to "share" their data (quarterly, about 80 companies so far). And NSA has standard rates for this.
Backdoors require quite a few MSFT people with--way more than--FU money agreeing to it. I would bet that something like this would leak. All it takes is one to annon leak a screenshot or a memo
Signal (the organization) has worked with other companies, like Facebook and WhatsApp (owned by FaceBook, I know), to implement the Signal protocol on their respective messaging services. It appears that's precisely what they're doing with Skype in this case. It's not like Microsoft is buying out Signal.